Resisting Work: The Corporatization of Life and Its Discontents

A job is no longer something we "do", but instead something we "are". As the boundaries between work and non-work have dissolved, we restructure ourselves and our lives using social ingenuity to get things done and be resourceful outside the official workday. In this book, the author insists that many jobs in the West are now regulated by a new matrix of power, biopower, where life itself is put to work through our ability to self-organize around formal rules. This neoliberal system of employment tries to absorb our life attributes, from our consumer tastes, downtime, and sexuality, into employment so that questions of human capital and resources replace questions of employee, worker, and labor. Here the author suggests that the corporation then turns to communal life, what he calls "the common", in order to reproduce itself and reinforce corporate culture. Yet a resistance against this new definition of work is in effect, and he shows how it may already be taking shape. -- From publisher's website.

a|
Come as you are: the new corporate enclosure movement -- Common matters -- Why the corporation doesn't work: a brief history -- Corporate culture and the coming bioproletariat -- "Free work" capitalism -- How to resist work today -- Working after neoliberalism.

a|
A job is no longer something we "do", but instead something we "are". As the boundaries between work and non-work have dissolved, we restructure ourselves and our lives using social ingenuity to get things done and be resourceful outside the official workday. In this book, the author insists that many jobs in the West are now regulated by a new matrix of power, biopower, where life itself is put to work through our ability to self-organize around formal rules. This neoliberal system of employment tries to absorb our life attributes, from our consumer tastes, downtime, and sexuality, into employment so that questions of human capital and resources replace questions of employee, worker, and labor. Here the author suggests that the corporation then turns to communal life, what he calls "the common", in order to reproduce itself and reinforce corporate culture. Yet a resistance against this new definition of work is in effect, and he shows how it may already be taking shape. -- From publisher's website.